Page 2307 - les-miserables

ter their carriage again, and all being finished, Cosette still
could not believe that it was real. She looked at Marius,
she looked at the crowd, she looked at the sky: it seemed as
though she feared that she should wake up from her dream.
Her amazed and uneasy air added something indescribably
enchanting to her beauty. They entered the same carriage to
return home, Marius beside Cosette; M. Gillenormand and
Jean Valjean sat opposite them; Aunt Gillenormand had
withdrawn one degree, and was in the second vehicle.
‘My children,’ said the grandfather, ‘here you are, Mon-
sieur le Baron and Madame la Baronne, with an income of
thirty thousand livres.’
And Cosette, nestling close to Marius, caressed his ear
with an angelic whisper: ‘So it is true. My name is Marius. I
am Madame Thou.’
These two creatures were resplendent. They had reached
that irrevocable and irrecoverable moment, at the dazzling
intersection of all youth and all joy. They realized the verses
of Jean Prouvaire; they were forty years old taken together.
It was marriage sublimated; these two children were two
lilies. They did not see each other, they did not contemplate
each other. Cosette perceived Marius in the midst of a glo-
ry; Marius perceived Cosette on an altar. And on that altar,
and in that glory, the two apotheoses mingling, in the back-
ground, one knows not how, behind a cloud for Cosette, in
a flash for Marius, there was the ideal thing, the real thing,
the meeting of the kiss and the dream, the nuptial pillow. All
the torments through which they had passed came back to
them in intoxication. It seemed to them that their sorrows,

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